Quote: "...they nonetheless impliedly consent to Google’s practices by virtue of the fact that all users of email must necessarily expect that their emails will be subject to automated processing.
Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient’s assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient’s ECS provider in the course of delivery.
Indeed,“a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 743-44 (1979)..."
I think this is a good summary.
Unless I'm missing something Google didn't "say" that, it was an explicit quote from another court case (see PDF's Page 19).
Talking about privacy. Why use services like Scribd ? A simple link to the pdf file hosted somewhere else would have suffice. I then can do my searches locally without them tracking exactly what I do (who views what, who searches what). SASS (Service as Software Substitute) is evil...
Should there not be a larger emphasis here on the nature of the service? It's not humans reading the mail, and the gathered data -as far as I know- does not enter the hands of a third party.
Anyone still using Google services since the NSA revelations is an idiot. I'd like to see them bankrupt after their betrayal of their do-no-evil and open source roots.
So - encrypt everything and send the keys trough snail mail? They can't read legally the mail right?
See page 28
It's like Google is asking their users to leave their service. How about creating a Lavabit-like solution instead, Google, instead of telling users that "if you use our service, you have no expectation of privacy"?
The "a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties" quote has been massively taken out of context by everyone who is covering this story.
The overall case appears to be about people complaining that Google scanning their emails and showing contextual ads is a privacy violation.
Most of this document is an explanation of why that shouldn't hold (Gmail users agreed to this when they signed the ToS, automatic scanning is essential for things like spam filtering and full-text search, legislating against this will kill innovation in online services etc).
The section that contains the "expectation of privacy" quote is in reply to part of the case which suggests that, while Gmail users may have accepted the ToS, non-Gmail users who send an email to a Gmail user have NOT accepted that ToS and hence are having their privacy violated.
The counter-argument presented is that, if you send a letter to someone and they allow their assistant to open it, you shouldn't be surprised by that. The analogy is that if you send an email to someone who has chosen to use a specific email provider, and that email provider automatically scans your email in some way, you shouldn't be surprised either.
As I read it, the "third parties" in the troublesome quote aren't Google themselves - they are the recipients of your email who happen to be using Gmail. You've turned over your information voluntarily to the recipient of your email, they can then chose to allow it to be automatically processed by the email provider they have an agreement with (without this violating your expectations of privacy).
I call bullshit on the whole story.